Advances in hardware and software have resulted in numerous new types of mobile Internet client devices such as hand-held computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), telephones, etc. As a trade-off for compact design and mobility, such client devices (hereinafter often referred to as “small-form-factor” devices) are generally manufactured to operate in resource constrained environments. A resource constrained environment is a hardware platform that provides substantially limited processing, memory, and/or display capabilities as compared, for example, to a desktop computing system. As a result, the types of devices across which Internet content may be accessed and displayed typically have diverse computing and content presentation capabilities as compared to one another.
Internet content authors and providers generally agree that serving a client base having disparate computing and content presentation capabilities over networks having different data throughput characteristics presents a substantial challenge. Conventional image adaptation techniques attempt to meet this challenge by reducing the size of high-resolution Internet content via resolution and content reduction as well as data compression techniques. Unfortunately, even though employing such conventional image adaptation techniques may speed-up content delivery to the client over a low-bandwidth connection, excessively reduced and compressed content often provide Internet client device users with a viewing experience that is not consistent with human perception. Such a viewing experience is also often contrary to the high-quality impression that content authors/providers prefer for the viewer to experience, and contrary to the universal access to high quality images viewers generally desire.
To make matters worse, algorithms used in conventional image adaptation schemes often involve large number of adaptation rules or over-intensive computations (e.g., semantic analysis) that are impracticable for systems that provide on-the-fly adaptive content delivery for mobile small-form-factor devices.
The following arrangements and procedures address these and other problems of conventional techniques to adapt content for delivery and presentation by Internet client devices.